(in Russian Сталин, Иосиф Виссарионович; original name
(Georgian) Ioseb Dzhugashvili). Born December 21 <December 9, Old Style>,
1879, Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire; died March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R. Secretary-general of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1953) and premier of the Soviet state (1941–1953), who for
a quarter of a century dictatorially ruled the Soviet Union and transformed it into a major world
power.During the quarter of a century preceding his
death, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably
exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. Stalin industrialized the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics, forcibly collectivized its agriculture, consolidated his position by intensive
police terror, helped to defeat Germany in 1941–1945, and extended Soviet controls to include a belt of
eastern European states. Chief architect of Soviet totalitarianism and a skilled but phenomenally ruthless
organizer, he destroyed the remnants of individual freedom and failed to promote individual prosperity, yet
he created a mighty military–industrial complex and led the Soviet Union into the nuclear
age.Stalin's biography was long obscured by
a mendacious Soviet-propagated “legend” exaggerating his prowess
as a heroic Bolshevik boy-conspirator and faithful follower of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union. In
his prime, Stalin was hailed as a universal genius, as a “shining sun,” or “the staff of life,” and also as
a “great teacher and friend” (especially of those communities he most savagely persecuted); once he was
even publicly invoked as “Our Father” by a metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church. Achieving wide
visual promotion through busts, statues, and icons of himself, the dictator became the object of
a fanatical cult that, in private, he probably regarded with cynicism.

The young revolutionary

Of Georgian – not Russian – origin, Joseph Stalin was the son of a poor cobbler in the provincial
Georgian town of Gori in the Caucasus, then an imperial Russian colony. The drunken father savagely beat
his son. Speaking only Georgian at home, Joseph learned Russian – which he always spoke with a guttural
Georgian accent – while attending the church school at Gori (1888–94). He then moved to the Tiflis
Theological Seminary, where he secretly read Karl Marx, the chief theoretician of international Communism,
and other forbidden texts, being expelled in 1899 for revolutionary activity, according to the “legend” –
or leaving because of ill health, according to his doting mother. The mother, a devout washerwoman, had
dreamed of her son becoming a priest, but Joseph Dzhugashvili was more ruffianly than clerical in
appearance and outlook. He was short, stocky, black-haired, fierce-eyed, with one arm longer than
the other, his swarthy face scarred by smallpox contracted in infancy. Physically strong and endowed with
prodigious willpower, he early learned to disguise his true feelings and to bide his time; in accordance
with the Caucasian blood-feud tradition, he was implacable in plotting long-term revenge against those who
offended him.In December 1899, Dzhugashvili became,
briefly, a clerk in the Tiflis Observatory, the only paid
employment that he is recorded as having taken outside politics; there is no record of his ever having
done manual labour. In 1900 he joined the political underground, fomenting labour demonstrations and
strikes in the main industrial centres of the Caucasus; but his excessive zeal in pushing duped workers
into bloody clashes with the police antagonized his fellow conspirators. After the Social Democrats
(Marxist revolutionaries) of the Russian Empire had split into their two competing wings – Menshevik and
Bolshevik – in 1903, Dzhugashvili joined the second, more militant, of these factions and became a disciple
of its leader, Lenin. Between April 1902 and March 1913, Dzhugashvili was seven times arrested for
revolutionary activity, undergoing repeated imprisonment and exile. The mildness of the sentences and
the ease with which the young conspirator effected his frequent escapes lend colour to the unproved
speculation that Dzhugashvili was for a time an agent provocateur in the pay of the imperial political
police.

Rise to power

Dzhugashvili made slow progress in the party hierarchy. He attended three policy-making conclaves of
the Russian Social Democrats – in Tammerfors (now Tampere, Finland; 1905), Stockholm (1906), and London
(1907) – without making much impression. But he was active behind the scenes, helping to plot a spectacular
holdup in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) on June 25 (June 12, Old Style), 1907, in order to “expropriate” funds for
the party. His first big political promotion came in February (January, Old Style) 1912, when Lenin – now in
emigration – co-opted him to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which had finally
broken with the other Social Democrats. In the following year, Dzhugashvili published, at Lenin's behest,
an important article on Marxism and the national question. By now he had adopted the name Stalin, deriving
from Russian stal (“steel”); he also briefly edited the newly founded Bolshevik newspaper Pravda before
undergoing his longest period of exile: in Siberia from July 1913 to March
1917.In about 1904 Stalin had married
a pious Georgian girl, Ekaterina Svanidze. She died some three years
later and left a son, Jacob, whom his father treated with contempt, calling him a weakling after
an unsuccessful suicide attempt in the late 1920s; when Jacob was taken prisoner by the Germans during
World War II, Stalin refused a German offer to exchange his son.Reaching Petrograd from Siberia on March 25 (March 12, Old Style), 1917, Stalin resumed
editorship of Pravda. He briefly advocated Bolshevik cooperation with the provisional government of
middle-class liberals that had succeeded to uneasy power on the last
tsar's abdication during the February Revolution. But under
Lenin's influence, Stalin soon switched to the more militant policy of armed seizure of power by
the Bolsheviks. When their coup d'etat occurred in November (October, Old Style) 1917, he played
an important role, but one less prominent than that of his chief rival, Leon
Trotsky.Active as a politico-military leader
on various fronts during the Civil War of 1918–1920, Stalin also
held two ministerial posts in the new Bolshevik government, being commissar for nationalities (1917–1923)
and for state control (or workers' and peasants' inspection; 1919–23). But it was his position as secretary
general of the party's Central Committee, from 1922 until his death, that provided the power base for his
dictatorship. Besides heading the secretariat, he was also member of the powerful Politburo and of many
other interlocking and overlapping committees – an arch-bureaucrat engaged in quietly outmaneuvering
brilliant rivals, including Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev, who despised such mundane organizational work.
Because the pockmarked Georgian was so obviously unintellectual, they thought him unintelligent – a gross
error, and one literally fatal in their case.From 1921 onward Stalin flouted the ailing
Lenin's wishes, until, a year before his death, Lenin wrote
a political “testament,” since widely publicized, calling for Stalin's removal from the secretary
generalship; coming from Lenin, this document was potentially ruinous to Stalin's career, but his usual
luck and skill enabled him to have it discounted during his lifetime.

Lenin's successor

After Lenin's death, in January 1924, Stalin promoted an extravagant, quasi-Byzantine cult of
the deceased leader. Archpriest of Leninism, Stalin also promoted his own cult in the following year by
having the city of Tsaritsyn renamed Stalingrad (now Volgograd). His main rival, Trotsky (once Lenin's heir
apparent), was now in eclipse, having been ousted by the ruling triumvirate of Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and
Stalin. Soon afterward Stalin joined with the rightist leaders Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov in
an alliance directed against his former co-triumvirs. Pinning his faith in the ability of the Soviet Union
to establish a viable political system without waiting for the support hitherto expected from worldwide
revolution, the Secretary General advocated a policy of “Socialism in one country”; this was popular with
the hardheaded party managers whom he was promoting to influential positions in the middle hierarchy. His
most powerful rivals were all dismissed, Bukharin and Rykov soon following Zinoviev and Kamenev into
disgrace and political limbo pending execution. Stalin expelled Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929 and
had him assassinated in Mexico in 1940.In 1928 Stalin abandoned Lenin's quasi-capitalist
New Economic Policy in favour of headlong
state-organized industrialization under a succession of five-year plans. This was, in effect, a new Russian
revolution more devastating in its effects than those of 1917. The dictator's blows fell most heavily on
the peasantry, some 25,000,000 rustic households being compelled to amalgamate in collective or state farms
within a few years. Resisting desperately, the reluctant muzhiks were attacked by troops and OGPU
(political police) units. Uncooperative peasants, termed kulaks, were arrested en masse, being shot,
exiled, or absorbed into the rapidly expanding network of Stalinist concentration camps and worked to death
under atrocious conditions. Collectivization also caused a great famine in the Ukraine. Yet Stalin
continued to export the grain stocks that a less cruel leader would have rushed to the famine-stricken
areas. Some 10,000,000 peasants may have perished through his policies during these
years.Crash industrialization was less disastrous
in its effects, but it, too, numbered its grandiose
failures, to which Stalin responded by arraigning industrial managers in a succession of show trials.
Intimidated into confessing imaginary crimes, the accused served as self-denounced scapegoats for
catastrophes arising from the Secretary General's policies. Yet Stalin was successful in rapidly
industrializing a backward country – as was widely acknowledged by enthusiastic contemporary foreign
witnesses, including Adolf Hitler and such well-known writers as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw.
Among those who vainly sought to moderate
Stalin's policies was his young second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva,
whom he had married in 1919 and who committed suicide in 1932. They had two children. The son,
Vasily, perished as an alcoholic after rising to unmerited high rank in the Soviet Air Force. The daughter,
Svetlana, became the object for her father's alternating affection and bad temper. She emigrated after his
death and later wrote memoirs that illuminate Stalin's well-camouflaged private life.

The great purges

In late 1934 – just when the worst excesses of Stalinism seemed to have spent themselves – the Secretary
General launched a new campaign of political terror against the very Communist Party members who had
brought him to power; his pretext was the assassination, in Leningrad on December 1, of his leading
colleague and potential rival, Sergey Kirov. That Stalin himself had arranged Kirov's murder – as an excuse
for the promotion of mass bloodshed – was strongly hinted by Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the party,
in a speech denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in
1956.Stalin used the show trial of leading Communists
as a means for expanding the new terror. In August
1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev were paraded in court to repeat fabricated confessions, sentenced to death, and
shot; two more major trials followed, in January 1937 and March 1938. In June 1937, Marshal Mikhail
Tukhachevsky, at the time the most influential military personality, and other leading generals were
reported as court-martialed on charges of treason and executed.Such were the main publicly acknowledged
persecutions that empowered Stalin to tame the Soviet Communist
Party and the Soviet elite as a whole. He not only “liquidated” veteran semi-independent Bolsheviks but
also many party bosses, military leaders, industrial managers, and high government officials totally
subservient to himself. Other victims included foreign Communists on Soviet territory and members of
the very political police organization, now called the NKVD. All other sections of the Soviet elite –
the arts, the academic world, the legal and diplomatic professions – also lost a high proportion of
victims, as did the population at large, to a semi-haphazard, galloping persecution that fed on extorted
denunciations and confessions. These implicated even more victims until Stalin himself reduced the terror,
though he never abandoned it. Stalin's political victims were numbered in tens of millions. His main motive
was, presumably, to maximize his personal power.

Role in World War II

During World War II Stalin emerged, after an unpromising start, as the most successful of the supreme
leaders thrown up by the belligerent nations. In August 1939, after first attempting to form an anti-Hitler
alliance with the Western powers, he concluded a pact with Hitler, which encouraged the German dictator to
attack Poland and begin World War II. Anxious to strengthen his western frontiers while his new but
palpably treacherous German ally was still engaged in the West, Stalin annexed eastern Poland, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania; he also attacked Finland and extorted territorial concessions. In
May 1941 Stalin recognized the growing danger of German attack on the Soviet Union by appointing himself
chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (head of the government); it was his first governmental
office since 1923.Stalin's prewar defensive measures were
exposed as incompetent by the German blitzkrieg that surged deep
into Soviet territory after Hitler's unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union of June 22, 1941. Khrushchev
claimed that Stalin was shocked into temporary inactivity by the onslaught, but, if so, he soon rallied and
appointed himself supreme commander in chief. When the Germans menaced Moscow in the winter of 1941, he
remained in the threatened capital, helping to organize a great counter-offensive. The battle of Stalingrad
(in the following winter) and the Battle of Kursk (in the summer of 1943) were also won by the Soviet Army
under Stalin's supreme direction, turning the tide of invasion against the retreating Germans, who
capitulated in May 1945. As war leader, Stalin maintained close personal control over the Soviet
battlefronts, military reserves, and war economy. At first over-inclined to intervene with inept telephoned
instructions, as Hitler did, the Soviet generalissimo gradually learned to delegate military decisions.

Last years

After the war, Stalin imposed on eastern Europe a new kind of colonial control based on native Communist
regimes nominally independent but in fact subservient to himself. He thus increased the number of his
subjects by about a hundred million. But in 1948 the defection of Titoist Yugoslavia from the Soviet camp
struck a severe blow to world Communism as a Stalin-dominated monolith. To prevent other client states from
following Tito's example, Stalin instigated local show trials, manipulated like those of the Great Purge of
the 1930s in Russia, in which satellite Communist leaders confessed to Titoism, many being
executed.Far from continuing his wartime alliance with
the United States and Great Britain, Stalin now regarded
these countries – and especially the United States – as the arch-enemies that he needed after Hitler's death.
At home, the primacy of Marxist ideology was harshly reasserted. Stalin's chief ideological hatchet man,
Andrey Zhdanov, a secretary of the Central Committee, began a reign of terror in the Soviet artistic and
intellectual world; foreign achievements were derided, and the primacy of Russians as inventors and
pioneers in practically every field was asserted. Hopes for domestic relaxation, widely aroused in
the Soviet Union during the war, were thus sadly disappointed.Increasingly suspicious and paranoid
in his later years, Stalin ordered the arrest, announced in January
1953, of certain – mostly Jewish – Kremlin doctors on charges of medically murdering various Soviet leaders,
including Zhdanov. The dictator was evidently preparing to make this “Doctors' Plot” the pretext for yet
another great terror menacing all his senior associates, but he died suddenly on March 5, according to
the official report; so convenient was this death to his entourage that suspicions of foul play were
voiced.

Assessment

A politician to the marrow of his bones, Stalin had little private or family life, finding his main
relaxation in impromptu buffet suppers, to which he would invite high party officials, generals, visiting
foreign potentates, and the like. Drinking little himself on these occasions, the dictator would encourage
excessive indulgence in others, thus revealing weak points that he could exploit. He would also tease his
guests, jocularity and malice being nicely balanced in his manner; for such bluff banter Stalin's main
henchman, Vyacheslav Molotov, the stuttering foreign minister, was often a target. Stalin had a keen,
ironical sense of humour, usually devoted to deflating his guests rather than to amusing
them.Foremost among Stalin's accomplishments
was the industrialization of a country which, when he assumed
complete control in 1928, was still notably backward by comparison with the leading industrial nations of
the world. By 1937, after less than a decade's rule as totalitarian dictator, he had increased the Soviet
Union's total industrial output to the point where it was surpassed only by that of the United States.
The extent of this achievement may best be appreciated if one remembers that Russia had held only fifth
place for overall industrial output in 1913, and that it thereafter suffered many years of even greater
devastation – through world war, civil war, famine, and pestilence – than afflicted any of the world's other
chief industrial countries during the same period. Yet more appallingly ravaged during World War II,
the Soviet Union was nevertheless able, under Stalin's leadership, to play a major part in defeating Hitler
while maintaining its position as the world's second most powerful industrial – and now military – complex
after the United States. In 1949 Stalinist Russia signaled its arrival as the world's second nuclear power
by exploding an atomic bomb.Against these formidable achievements
must be set one major disadvantage. Though a high industrial
output was indeed achieved under Stalin, very little of it ever became available to the ordinary Soviet
citizen in the form of consumer goods or amenities of life. A considerable proportion of the national
wealth – a proportion wholly unparalleled in the history of any peacetime capitalist country – was
appropriated by the state to cover military expenditure, the police apparatus, and further
industrialization. It is also arguable that a comparable degree of industrialization would have come about
in any case – and surely by means less savage – under almost any conceivable regime that might have evolved as
an alternative to Stalinism.Stalin's collectivization of agriculture did not
produce positive economic results remotely comparable
to those attained by Soviet industry. Considered as a means of asserting control over the politically
recalcitrant peasantry, however, collectivization justified itself and continued to do so for decades,
remaining one of the dictator's most durable achievements. Moreover, the process of intensive urbanization,
as instituted by Stalin, continued after his death in what still remained a population more predominantly
rural than that of any other major industrial country. In 1937, 56 percent of the population was recorded
as engaged in agriculture or forestry; by 1958 that proportion had dropped to 42 percent, very largely as
a result of Stalin's policies.Another of the dictator's achievements was
the creation of his elaborately bureaucratized administrative
machinery based on the interlinking of the Communist Party, ministries, legislative bodies, trade unions,
political police, and armed forces, and also on a host of other meshing control devices. During the decades
following the dictator's death, these continued to supply the essential management levers of Soviet
society, often remaining under the control of individuals who had risen to prominence during the years of
the Stalinist terror. But the element of total personal dictatorship did not survive Stalin in its most
extreme form. One result of his death was the resurgence of the Communist Party as the primary centre of
power, after years during which that organization, along with all other Soviet institutions, had been
subordinated to a single man's whim. Yet, despite the great power wielded by Stalin's successors as party
leaders, they became no more than dominant figures within the framework of a ruling oligarchy. They did not
develop into potentates responsible to themselves alone, such as Stalin was during his quarter of
a century's virtually unchallenged rule.That Stalin's system persisted as long
as it did, in all its major essentials, after the death of its
creator is partly due to the very excess of severity practiced by the great tyrant. Not only did his
methods crush initiative among Soviet administrators, physically destroying many, but they also left
a legacy of remembered fear so extreme as to render continuing post-Stalin restrictions tolerable to
the population; the people would have more bitterly resented – might even, perhaps, have rejected – such
rigours, had it not been for their vivid recollection of repressions immeasurably harsher. Just as Hitler's
wartime cruelty toward the Soviet population turned Stalin into a genuine national hero – making him
the Soviet Union's champion against an alien terror even worse than his own – so too Stalin's successors owed
the stability of their system in part to the comparison, still fresh in many minds, with the far worse
conditions that obtained during the despot's sway.Stalin has arguably made a greater impact
on the lives of more individuals than any other figure in
history. But the evaluation of his overall achievement still remains, decades after his death, a highly
controversial matter. Historians have not yet reached any definitive consensus on the worth of his
accomplishments, and it is unlikely that they ever will. To the American scholar George F. Kennan, Stalin
is a great man, but one great in his “incredible criminality . . . a criminality effectively without
limits,” while Robert C. Tucker, an American specialist on Soviet affairs, has described Stalin as
a 20th-century Ivan the Terrible. To the British historian E.H. Carr, the Georgian dictator appears as
a ruthless, vigorous figure, but one lacking in originality – a comparative nonentity thrust into greatness
by the inexorable march of the great revolution that he found himself leading. To the late Isaac Deutscher,
the author of biographies of Trotsky and Stalin – who, like Carr, broadly accepts Trotsky's version of Stalin
as a somewhat mediocre personage – Stalin represents a lamentably deviant element in the evolution of
Marxism. Neither Deutscher nor Carr has found Stalin's truly appalling record sufficiently impressive to
raise doubts about the ultimate value of the Russian October Revolution's historic
achievements.To such views may be added the suggestion
that Stalin was anything but a plodding mediocrity, being
rather a man of superlative, all-transcending talent. His special brilliance was, however, narrowly
specialized and confined within the single crucial area of creative political manipulation, where he
remains unsurpassed. Stalin was the first to recognize the potential of bureaucratic power, while the other
Bolshevik leaders still feared their revolution being betrayed by a military man. Stalin's political
ability went beyond tactics, as he was able to channel massive social forces both to meet his economic
goals and to expand his personal power.